Thursday, March 24, 2011

"The First Amendment was written by the Founders to protect the free exercise of Christianity. They were making no effort to give special protections to Islam... Islam has no fundamental First Amendment claims, for the simple reason that it was not written to protect the religion of Islam. Islam is entitled only to the religious liberty we extend to it out of courtesy. While there certainly ought to be a presumption of religious liberty for non-Christian religious traditions in America, the Founders were not writing a suicide pact when they wrote the First Amendment."

-- American Family Association "Director of Issues Analysis" and conservative talk radio host Bryan Fischer

Look, on any given day you could troll the fringes of either end of the political spectrum and find a half-dozen or so lunatic proclamations that don't deserve to be taken seriously. What makes this particular nut-job stand out, though, is something I've mentioned before quite a few times, the thing that separates the left from the right and renders the "both sides do it" meme inauthentic: He's embraced by some of the biggest mainstream names within the conservative movement. Fischer may be a ranting, xenophobic self-parody, but his radio show is a regular command performance stop on the campaign trail for guys like Mike Huckabee and the seemingly sane Tim Pawlenty. And that's what makes the kind of dogshit he spews so dangerous.

6 comments:

The first thought I had when I saw this is "I wonder what he thinks about the Second Amendment?" Should he follow his own logic, I would think he would be opposed to handguns and assault rifles and the like being constitutionally protected, since presumably the founders did not have those types of weapons in mind any more than they would have had Islam in mind when writing the bill of rights. Of course, it turns out he loves the 2nd Amendment (and I'd venture sees no irony whatsoever in the contrast in his positions). So it goes.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the 1st Amendment didn't actually refer to any articular religion. I'm not trying to identify with either side on this, just trying to make a logic-type argument. Personally, I'm still waiting for the day when Bill Maher says "New Rule, we shouldn't have to put up with people who choose to live a certain way by choice, and this is why religion shouldn't have any kind of protection."

Sam and Narbe are both dead on here. This is just a selective and very, very wrong interpretation of the Constitution and American history. The founders were well read and some of them were widely traveled. It is inconceivable that they had no knowledge of Islam.

Maybe Fischer has a point--I mean, there's absolutely no evidence any of the Founders were familiar with Islam; why, it's not as if any of them ever, oh, I dunno, owned a copy of the Quran or specifically mentioned whether or not religious freedom should cover Islam or anyth--

I Googled Jefferson and the Koran. Seems like before 911 Jefferson bought the Koran while studying law at William & Mary in 1765. Seems Jefferson did not care for the Koran's authoritarian vein that did not allow for interpretation of rulings, but he was interested enough in the culture to attempt to learn Arabic.

Years later he was asked to try to work out a treaty with North African (Muslim) thug leadership backing the Pirates who worked for them. Jefferson reported that the leaders justified the legality of the attacks based on the teaching of the Koran. These thugs essentially said they would lay of American interests if we paid a large fee. They kept jacking up their protection money demands to a point where the US would not pay, and the pirate attacks on US ships resumed. Later, when Jefferson became President, he ordered attacks on North African pirate strongholds with modern warships; and eventually the Marines busted up their operation landing "on the shores of Tripoli."

Post 911 we learn Jefferson obtained the book 35 years after college while he was President. He did so to learn of the evils of Islamofacism. Learning of the pure evil in the Koran put him in a better position to unleash the awesome war power of America to kill him some North African Jihadist Pirates bent on destroying democracy and Christianity. Thank God Jefferson saved Murica from Sharia law.

(Also, too Jefferson a deist, re-wrote the Christian Bible with all supernatural references to miracles taken out.)

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